LGBTQ rights in the United Kingdom


The rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the United Kingdom have developed significantly over time. Today, lesbian, gay and bisexual rights are considered to be advanced by international standards. However, evaluations from ILGA-Europe have indicated significant backsliding, with the UK receiving the highest score in Europe in the organisation's 2015 report on LGBTI rights, before falling to 22nd place in the 2025 report. In particular, anti-trans rhetoric in UK media has been described as "increasing and becoming more vitriolic" since 2016 and becoming "super-charged" since 2018.
Prior to the formal introduction of Christianity in Britain in 597 AD, when Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Britain, the citizens might have been able to practice homosexuality through the Celtic, Roman and Anglo Saxon periods, though evidence is lacking: for example there are no surviving Celtic written records. Post 597 AD, Christianity and homosexuality clashed. Same-sex male sexual activity was characterised as "sinful" but not illegal. Under the Buggery Act 1533 male anal sex was outlawed and made punishable by death. LGBT rights first came to prominence following the decriminalisation of sexual activity between men, in 1967 in England and Wales, and later in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Sexual activity between women was never subject to the same legal restriction.
Since the turn of the 21st century, LGBTQ rights have increasingly strengthened in support. Some discrimination protections have been in place for LGBT people since 1999, but they were then extended to all areas under the Equality Act 2010. A ban on LGBT individuals serving openly in the armed forces was officially lifted in 2016, though a policy of non-enforcement had been in place since 2000. The age of consent was equalised at 16, regardless of sexual orientation, in 2001. Having been introduced in the 1980s, Section 28, which prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality" by schools and local authorities, was repealed in 2003. Transgender people have had the ability to apply to change their legal gender since 2005. The same year, same-sex couples were granted the right to enter into a civil partnership, a similar legal structure to marriage, and also to adopt in England and Wales. Scotland later followed on adoption rights for same-sex couples in 2009, and Northern Ireland in 2013. Same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales, and Scotland in 2014, and in Northern Ireland in 2020.
In ILGA-Europe's 2015 review of LGBTI rights, the UK received the highest score in Europe, with 86% progress toward "respect of human rights and full equality" for LGBT people and 92% in Scotland alone. However, by 2020, the UK had dropped to ninth place in the ILGA-Europe rankings with a score of 66% and the executive also expressed concern about a "hostile climate on trans rights fuelled by opposition groups". By 2025, the UK's ranking had fallen further to 22nd place, with a score of 45%, the third steepest drop from 2024 in Europe, behind only Hungary and Georgia. Meanwhile, 86% of the UK agreed that homosexuality should be accepted by society, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll, and a 2017 poll showed that 77% of British people support same-sex marriage.
The 2021 census found that 3.2% of people in England and Wales identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or other, and 262,000 people identified as transgender. However, YouGov and Stonewall have argued that polling and census results are likely influenced by under-reporting, and estimate that the actual figure is between 5 and 7%. LGBT rights organisations and very large LGBT communities have been built across the UK, most notably in Brighton, which is widely regarded as the UK's unofficial "gay capital", with other large communities in Blackpool often referred to as the "Gay Capital of the North", Manchester, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne, Edinburgh, Belfast and Southampton which all have gay villages and host annual pride festivals.

Same-sex sexual activity

Homosexuality as an offence

identified anal sex as an offence punishable by hanging as a result of the Buggery Act 1533, which was pioneered by Henry VIII. The Act was the country's first civil sodomy law, such offences having previously been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. While it was repealed in 1553 on the accession of Mary I, it was re-enacted in 1563 under Elizabeth I. James Pratt and John Smith were the last two to be executed for sodomy in 1835.
Although section 61 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 removed the death penalty for homosexuality, male homosexual acts remained illegal and were punishable by imprisonment. In 1862, the Indian Penal Code, created by the colonial authorities of the British Raj, came into force. The code included Section 377, which effectively criminalised same-sex activity in India. The Code was used as the basis for law in Britain's other colonies, therefore exporting anti-homosexuality laws throughout the British Empire. Today, anti-homosexuality laws still exist in a total of 34 member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Labouchere Amendment, section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, extended the laws regarding homosexuality to include any homosexual act between males, even when there were no witnesses. This meant that people could be convicted for private acts, and often a letter between two people expressing affection was enough evidence to convict. Oscar Wilde was convicted under this law and sentenced to 2 years of penal labour. Conversely, lesbians were never acknowledged or targeted by legislation.
In Scotland, although there were no statutes making sex between men unlawful between 1424 and 1707, homosexual acts were punishable. One example is the commission for trial of Gavin Bell.
In the early 1950s, the police actively enforced laws prohibiting sexual behaviour between men. By the end of 1954, there were 1,069 homosexual men in prison in England and Wales, with an average age of 37. There were a number of high-profile arrests and trials, including that of scientist, mathematician, and war-time code-breaker Alan Turing, convicted in 1952 of "gross indecency". He accepted treatment with female hormones as an alternative to prison. Turing committed suicide in 1954. In 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in response to a petition, issued an apology on behalf of the British Government for "the appalling way he was treated". In 1954, the trial and eventual imprisonment of Edward Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood for committing acts of "homosexual indecency" caused uproar and led to the establishment of a committee to examine and report on the law covering "homosexual offences" appointed by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe and Sir Hugh Lucas-Tooth.

Wolfenden

The Wolfenden Committee was set up on 24 August 1954 to consider UK law relating to "homosexual offences"; the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was published on 3 September 1957. It recommended that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence", finding that "homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects."
In October 1957, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, spoke in support of the Wolfenden Report, saying that "There is a sacred realm of privacy... into which the law, generally speaking, must not intrude. This is a principle of the utmost importance for the preservation of human freedom, self-respect, and responsibility." The first parliamentary debate on the Wolfenden Report was initiated on 4 December 1957 by Lord Pakenham. Of the seventeen peers who spoke in the debate, eight broadly supported the recommendations in the Wolfenden Report. Maxwell Fyfe, by then ennobled as Lord Kilmuir and serving as Lord Chancellor, speaking for the Government, doubted that there would be much public support for implementing the recommendations and stated that further research was required. The Homosexual Law Reform Society was founded on 12 May 1958, mainly to campaign for the implementation of the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations.

Decriminalisation of homosexual acts

In 1965, Conservative peer Lord Arran proposed the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in the House of Lords. This was followed by Humphry Berkeley in the House of Commons a year later, though Berkeley ascribed his defeat in the 1966 general election to the unpopularity of this action. However, in the newly elected Parliament, Labour MP Leo Abse took up the issue and the Sexual Offences Bill was put before Parliament in order to implement some of the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations after almost ten years of campaigning.
The Sexual Offences Act 1967 was accordingly passed and received royal assent on 27 July 1967 after an intense late-night debate in the House of Commons. It maintained general prohibitions on buggery and indecency between men, but provided for a limited decriminalisation of homosexual acts where three conditions were fulfilled: 1) the act had to be consensual, 2) the act had to take place in private and 3) the act could involve only people that had attained the age of 21. This was a higher age of consent than that for heterosexual acts, which was set at 16. Further, "in private" limited participation in an act to two people. This condition was interpreted strictly by the courts, which took it to exclude acts taking place in a room in a hotel, for example, and in private homes where a third person was present. These restrictions were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in 2000.
The 1967 Act extended only to England and Wales. Organisations, therefore, continued to campaign for the goal of full equality in Scotland and Northern Ireland where all homosexual behaviour remained illegal. Same-sex sexual activities were legalised in Scotland on the same basis as in the 1967 Act, by section 80 of the Criminal Justice Act 1980, which came into force on 1 February 1981. An analogous amendment was also made to the law of Northern Ireland, following the determination of a case by the European Court of Human Rights ; since Northern Ireland was subject to direct rule at the time, the relevant legislation was an Order in Council, the Homosexual Offences Order 1982, which came into force on 8 December 1982.